I know this is a little outside of the traditional NANOG realm but...

I have a customer looking at a fair number of Xirrus Wireless Arrays for 802.11a/b/g/n implementations and am looking for some real world insight into them. On the cover they look cool, the white papers look cool, but I am yet to find technical commentary from a real person on these devices. Looking at the XN line, and just curious if anyone has deployed these, supports these or knows anything about them. I can only speak from indirect experience; the rehab place where my wife is staying for a bit uses 4 or 5 of them (older, probably not current, flying-saucer-like boxes suspended from the ceiling at hallway junctions) and there, at least, they appear to work pretty well. The

On 03/13/2012 02:34 PM, Blake Pfankuch wrote: particular ones don't appear to my laptop to do 11a. However, I don't think there is any significant user density just from watching the nifty directional light display, so this may not mean much (I'd guess 3 to 10 users over the whole building including smartphones and a couple of pieces of medical equipment that isn't used much). Also there is no IT (or any real technical maint) guy on-premises to talk to so I can't ask about any other aspect. The local real hospital uses a Cisco system (or at least Cisco APs; don't know about the AP manager box) which really does appear to work well; I'd guess several hundred APs with lots of full-time medical gear, and a "guest" network which is behind a rather draconian firewall (wouldn't let me ssh out to a non-standard port (65k range), for example; I had to fix myself a 443 ssh port for the time we spent there a couple of months ago... Blocked 25 outgoing; I don't blame them for that, however they also blocked 465 (but allowed 587)). I suspect if I wanted 2.4-only I'd go with ubiquiti, but I don't have any experience with them, and their "unifi" boxes don't (yet) come in 5gig. And they don't appear to have independent APs in each box, though I don't know how well the "directional" antennas in the Xirrus actually separate things; even a 100mw transmitter may well overwhelm all the other local receivers unless there is a bunch of shielding inside the enclosure (and maybe even then...) If 802.11 was frequency-split like the cell system it would help such systems a bunch. -- Pete

Thanks!

Blake